The winner of this year’s ZVONO Award for Young Visual Artists in Bosnia and Herzegovina is Igor Bošnjak (* 1981, Sarajevo). The award winner was announced at the opening of the finalists group exhibition at SKLOP by James Merle Thomas, professor for Global art history at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia/USA & jury member.
As the winner of the ZVONO 2018 Award, Igor Bošnjak will attend a two-month art residency in New York at Residency Unlimited, starting from February 2019. Further, a solo exhibition of his work will be realised upon his return from the USA.
Bošnjak graduated from painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trebinje, and received his master’s degree at the University of Art in Belgrade, in the program Interdisciplinary Studies: Art and Media Theory. He is currently teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trebinje. He was already selected as the finalist of the ZVONO award in 2010.
The two presented video works by the winner set the most universal existential questions. They stand for an attempt to overcome human spatial-temporal constraints on the one hand, but at the same time seem to consciously accept and contextually criticize them in their socio-political specifics, on the other. His video-work A Monument to the Fallen War Heroes of the Future War (2017) plays with the semantics of the past and the future by setting the syntagms of the fighters and the future war into an oxymoron figure. In that way, he sets the Bosnian socio-political future in a dystopian position, by simultaneously criticizing its past.
The works of Igor Bošnjak, as well as the finalist Nikola Kekerović, Saša Tatić and Vesna Majstorović are available to the public at the exhibition at the premises of the Association SKLOP until 14.12.2018.
The ZVONO Award for Young Visual Artists in BiH was founded in 2006 by the Association SCCA Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art. From 2017, the new official partner for the organization of the ZVONO Award in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the Association for Research, Documentation and Presentation of Art SKLOP.
The ZVONO SKLOP award is realized with two partners from New York: The Trust for Mutual Understanding and Residency Unlimited.
The ZVONO Award is part of the YVAA Young Visual Artists Award, whose members comprise a total of 12 countries of Southeast Europe (www.yvaawards.org).
The project is supported by the Government of Switzerland.
Finalists of The ZVONO Award 2018:
Igor BOŠNJAK (*1981, Sarajevo)
Nikola KEKEROVIĆ (*1991, Banja Luka)
Vesna MAJSTOROVIĆ (*1994, Gradiška)
Saša TATIĆ (*1991, Banja Luka)
The finalists and the winner were/was selected by an international jury consisting of:
Jean-Claude FREYMOND-GUTH, independent curator and artist advisor (Basel/CH & Brussels/BE); Nina KOMEL, artist and the Zvono award winner 2016 (Brod/BA), Karina KOTTOVA, curator & director of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society (Prague/CZE); James Merle TMOMAS, Professor of Global Contemporary Art, Tyler School of Art, Temple University (Philadelphia/US), Christopher YGGDRE, director L’ Agence à Paris/FR & co-curator Pavilion of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the 57th Biennale di Venezia, 2017 (Paris/FR).
